Briefs

(MCT) NEW YORK – Barack Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton in all three states up for… (MCT) NEW YORK – Barack Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton in all three states up for grabs in Saturday’s Democratic contests, building momentum in the deadlocked race for the party’s nomination.

Obama, the Illinois senator, more than doubled Clinton’s output in caucuses in Nebraska and Washington state and defeated her in Louisiana’s primary.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee won an overwhelming victory in the Kansas GOP presidential caucuses Saturday, but he still remains well behind frontrunner John McCain.

With 60 percent support, Huckabee trounced the Arizona senator, who received 24 percent. Huckabee won all 36 of the state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention.

The former Arkansas governor’s victory comes as he continued to vow to remain in the GOP race for the White House despite McCain’s large delegate lead.

Preliminary results of a survey of voters leaving their polling places in Louisiana showed that nearly half of those casting ballots were black.

As a group, black voters have overwhelmingly favored Obama in earlier primaries, helping him to wins in South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. – Reid J. Epstein, McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT) CHICAGO – The long and bitter Hollywood writers strike that has wreaked havoc on television schedules and led to millions of dollars of lost income for the entertainment industry may soon be over, according to the heads of the Writers Guild of America.

“We have a tentative deal,” Patric Verrone and Michael Winship wrote in a letter to their members Saturday.

“It is an agreement that protects a future in which the Internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery,” they said. “It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas, and establishes the principle that, `When they get paid, we get paid.'”

Verrone and Winship said the deal would be discussed at member meetings Saturday in New York and Los Angeles.

The proposed deal runs through May 1, 2011, and provides for a minimum annual pay rate increase of 3.5 percent each year, with the exception of network prime time and daytime serial script fees, which will increase 3 percent.

Further, the deal recognizes the WGA “as the exclusive bargaining representative for writing for new media,” such as the Internet or cellular technology.

Securing the deal means the 80th annual Oscar awards ceremony will be telecast. The Feb. 24 ceremony was threatened with the same fate as January’s Golden Globes, which saw its ceremony reduced to a short press conference announcing winners after actors refused to cross writers’ picket lines. – MarketWatch

(MCT) NEW YORK – State University of New York-Old Westbury has removed 87 residential students from their dormitories for having grade point averages below 2.0.

The policy has been blasted by faculty and students, but an administrator said Friday that the rule – which he described as an effort to raise academic standards – would continue.

“Our goal is to have students with us who are serious about their studies,” Michael Kinane, assistant to the president, said.

The students were removed from their dorm rooms last month. The Faculty Senate then unanimously passed three resolutions seeking to have the policy suspended, largely because that group feels it is inconsistent with best practices and disproportionately impacts freshmen, said Faculty Senate chair Maureen Dolan, a mathematics and computer science professor.

The policy has been in effect since at least 1994, Kinane said, but it had not previously been enforced. – Christina Hernandez, Newsday